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OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 



A THANKSGIVING SERMON, 



PREACHED AT THE 



CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, 



NOVEMBER 2G, 1863. 



BY 

PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
WILLIAM S. & ALFRED MARTIEN, 

606 Chestnut Strket. 
1863. 



.3 

.B67 



Tr'f 



Philadelphia, November 27th, 18G3. 
Rev. Phillips Brooks, 

Dear Sir— We beg to request for publication a copy of the Sermon which you delivered 
on Thanksgiving Day, in the Church of the Uoly Trinity. 
Very respectfully, 

STEPHEN COLWELL, 

HORACE BINNET, Jr. 

GEORGE M. STROUD, 

UENRY C. CAREY, 

GEORGE n. STUART, 

WILLIAM M. MEREDITH, 

LEMUEL COFFIX, 

MORTON McMICHAEL, 

EDWARD S. WHELEN, 

LEWIS R. ASHHURST, 

THOMAS H. POWERS, 

FAIRMAN ROGERS, 

W. R. LEJEE, 

M. W. BALDWIN, 

JOHN ASHHURST, 

SAUNDERS LEWIS, 

CADWALADER BIDDLE, 

J. FORSYTH MEIGS, M. D. 

EVANS ROGERS, 

ARTHUR G. COFFIN, 

H. PRATT McKEAN, 

ISAAC HAZLEIIURST, 

E. OTIS KENDALL, 
THEODORE FROTHINGUAM, 
EDWARD H. TROTTRR, 
WM. H. ASHHURST, 

F. FRALEY, 
WM. P. CRESSON, 
W. DWIGHT BELL, 
WM. D. LEWIS, 
JAMES L. CLAGHORN, 
JOHN B. THAYER, 



JOHN CLAYTON, 
JAY COOKE, 
HENRY C. LEA, 

A. E. BORIE, 

L. MONTGOMERY BOND, 
EDWIN M. LEWIS, 
C. B. BARCLAY, 
J. I. CLARK HARE, 
CHARLES GIBBONS, 
J. FISHER LEAMING, 
HENRY C. BOND, 
J. M. BIDDLE, 
C. L. BORIE, 
WILLIAM WISTER, 

E. W. CLARK, 
GEORGE WHITNEY, 
J. G. FELL, 

F. A. COMLY, 
THOMAS A. BIDDLE, 

B. GERHARD, 

W. M. TILGHMAN, 
GIBSON PEACOCK, 
CHARLES H. WELLING, 
CHRISTOPHER WETHERILL, 
JAMES H. ORNE, 
J. B. NEWMAN, 
LINDLEY SMYTH, 
RICHARD L. ASHHURST, 
SOLOMON W. ROBERTS, 
STEPHEN A. CALDWELL, 
THOMAS B. WATTSON. 



Locust Street, Thursday, December 3, 1863. 
Gentlemen : 

I herewith place my Thanksgiving Sermon at your disposal. 
Tours Tery truly, 

PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
Mr. Stephen Colweil, 
Mr. Horace Binnet, Jr., 
' and others. 



SERMON 



Jeremiah xvi. 14, 15. 

THEREFORE, BEHOLD, THE DAYS COME, SAITH THE LORD, THAT IT SHALL NO 
MORE BE SAID, THE LORD LIVETH, THAT BROUGHT UP THE CHILDREN OF 
ISRAEL OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT; BUT, THE LORD LIVETH, THAT 
BROUGHT UP THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL FROM THE LAND OF THE NORTH. 
AND FROM ALL THE LANDS WHITHER HE HAD DRIVEN THEM: AND 1 WILL 
BRING THEM AGAIN INTO THEIR LAND WHICH I GAVE UNTO THEIR FATHERS. 

We are assembled to give thanks to God to-day. 
under new circumstances, with new blessings that 
call on us for a new song of praise. If this old 
Puritan Thanksgiving Day, now become a national 
institution, is to be a genuine and vital thing, it is 
necessary first of all that it should commemorate 
each year that year's peculiar mercies. The earnest 
men who started such a practice, had far too con- 
stant and reverent a sense of God to desire that this 
annual observance ever should degenerate into a 
mere stereotyped and formal repetition of the well- 
worn thanks that other generations have long ren- 
dered up for long past mercies. They believed in 
such an ever-fresh Providence as should leave no 
year empty-handed of its own peculiar blessings. I 



b OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

think that they were right. I think so more than 
ever, when I look back and see how immensely the 
mercies for which we are to render thanks to-day 
surpass in their character those of any previous year. 
I accept it as a grateful, though not an easy task, this 
morning, to try to define the new sort of the new 
privileges which we enjoy, to show how it exceeds 
any old sort of privilege for which our fathers ren- 
dered gratitude, and to commend it to your earnest, 
humble, and practical acknowledgment. 

The benefactions of God, I am inclined to think, 
follow one general design. His highest benefits are 
always of the character of a re-occupation of some 
province of mercy, which has been inhabited before, 
but only partially realized and enjoyed. It would 
seem as if man always had to enter twice upon his 
heritage before he made it really his. Is not this 
the large scheme of the world's perfection'? It 
started with the beauty and delight of Paradise; 
but the new creature, as it proved, was not yet fit to 
fill all the great design of Eden with the appropriate 
fulness of perfect life. He fell out of his imperfect 
mastership; but thenceforth through all his sufi'er- 
ing, every struggle is always represented as a strug- 
gle for return; the final consummation is always a 
reentrance into the original programme of the gar- 
den, and of the life of the first man created in the 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 7 

image of God. And how beautifully the same plan 
is evident in the culture of any successful Christian • 
life. A child starts with the unrealized purity and 
completeness of character that belongs to childhood. 
Because it is unrealized, the man wanders out of it 
and loses it — and then for the old world-worn crea- 
ture stumbling his way back, there is no higher 
mercy than this mercy of re-occupation, no higher 
grace than that by which we must all " be converted 
and become as little children." 

Two verses from Jeremiah bring before us an- 
other illustration of the same idea in the history of 
the Jews. Israel had been brought into the pro- 
mised land years before. It had occupied that land 
in part, gathered out of it part of the comfort and 
cultrtl^" and use it had to give. It had always 
thanked the Lord of the Eed Sea and the Jordan 
for the power by which He brought their fathers in. 
In time the people's misuse of their land had led to 
their expulsion from it, and now their prophet comes 
to promise them a greater good. " Behold, the days 
come, saith the Lord, that ye shall no more say, 
The Lord liveth, which brought up the children of 
Israel out of the land of Egypt; but. The Lord 
liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from 
all the lands whither he had driven them: I will 
bring them again into their land which I gave unto 



8 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION". 

their fathers." He announces God's policy, and it 
■ is once more a poHcy of re-occupation. Israel's 
highest blessing is to be a restoral to a more perfect 
use and ownership of the same Canaan into which 
Joshua had led their fathers. 

I have selected this passage for our text to-day, 
because, as I stand and look back over these last two 
years, I can find no truer description of the mercy 
that has filled them than just this — that it is the 
mercy of re-occupation. You will not find one 
natural blessing that we have not enjoyed for years. 
There is not an acre of our country now that was 
not ours in 1860. There is no principle of public 
law or social duty that was not written in our books 
three years ago. We hold no theories of virtue or 
of truth that our fathers did not hold and leave 
described for us most explicitly. There is no new 
realm of life; but yet I believe, and I shall try to 
show, that all through these last years, and espe- 
cially through this last year, there has been a great 
drawing back of all of us to resume and fully occupy 
realms of life, blessings and duties which were never 
but half-occupied before. I hope to make this 
simple thought more plain as I go on, and to prove 
that I am right in stating as our appropriate subject 
for to-day, "Our Mercies of Re-occupation." 

And, first of all, we ought to render up our thanks 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 9 

for the new power and completeness with which the 
ordinary blessings of God's natural providence have 
been received and realized, in consequence of the 
peculiar circumstances under which we have been 
living. When this war began, you know how 
heavy the air was with gloomy prophecies of the 
ruin that was to come upon us here at home, in the 
derangement of labor, in the scarceness of supplies, 
in the stoppage of business, in the insecurity of pro- 
perty. The war is almost three years old, and 
industry was never richer, homes were never hap- 
pier, trade never paid so well, harvests never 
crowded the bursting barns more fully than in the 
abundant prosperity of this battle-autumn. What 
shall we do'? Is it the part of earnest men just to 
come up to our churches and thank God for the 
corn-fields and the busy stores, and say nothing 
about the war, under whose red glare the sickle 
does its peaceful battle with the grain, and the quick 
dollars pile themselves upon your desk. I think 
not. I think no gratitude is loyal or reasonable that 
does not carry the earnestness and solemnity of all 
our present life into every thanksgiving that it has 
to pay. This prosperity is not like other prosperity. 
How many men have felt it. How, with the best 
part of our thriving merchants, you have seen the 
difference — the way in which their gain was not 



10 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION". 

taken as a matter of course, as it used to be, but the 
evident presence of God among us has made many 
a man, careless and utterly thoughtless before, take 
his unexpected fortune with something almost like 
reverence, as if he took it directly out of the open 
hand of the Almighty. This is the first re-occupa- 
tion. We enter this year into our barns of plenty, 
and so much of the solemnity of the time clings 
about them, that v^^e tread their floors as if we trod 
a church's aisle, and look round upon their old 
familiar plenty with a new sense that it all comes 
from God. 

I know the exceptions just as well as you do. I 
know too well the sickening frivolity, (it is worse 
than that, the fool-hardy impiety,) that is daring to 
desecrate these solemn times with the flaunting of 
its selfish finery, and the wretched display of its 
new-made money; but there is a better side, and 
let us rejoice in that. There is a great sanctifica- 
tion of ordinary life and ordinary blessing by the 
extraordinary light that falls on them out of the 
supreme interests of our time. It must be so. No 
great apostolic cause ever walks through a nation's 
life, but little concerns creep up instinctively, and 
try to catch some shade of its grandeur — as of old, 
in Jerusalem, the sick came and were laid along the 
temple-courts, "if that the shadow of Peter passing 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION". 11 

by might overshadow some of them." Among the 
truest of the prosperity of our country in the years 
to come, will be that which has shared in the trans- 
figuration of these sacred times — which has re-occu- 
pied its old treasure-houses, and found them temples 
sacred to diviner uses than it ever guessed — which 
has roused itself as, when God had been speaking 
words of blessing to him in Bethel, Jacob "waked 
out of his sleep, and said, Surely the Lord is in this 
place, and I knew it not." 

It seems to me every dollar made in these war- 
times ought to be sacred. T should think every 
man who is staying at home and making a fortune 
now, would want to take at least one poor man who 
has been to the war and been disabled; and, countinsr 
him his substitute, provide for him and his for life. 
A man who is coining money out of his country's 
agony, and keeping it to spend upon himself, must 
feel so like a very Gehazi. " Is it a time to receive 
money and to receive garments, and oliveyards, and 
vineyards, and sheep, and oxen"?" When those 
whose duty to be there is no more than ours, are 
putting every comfort by and standing between us 
and the traitors, camping in the wretchedness of 
the cold open field, fighting in the front ranks of 
our thinned armies, suff'ering in the solitude of far- 
ofi' hospitals, starving in that loathsome prison which 



12 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

is going to make Southern civilization the everlast- 
ing by-word of the nineteenth century — what right 
have we to occupy the prosperity, under whose 
groaning portals we enter in with thanks to-day, 
save as the guardian holds his solemn trust, sacred 
from common use, ready to answer to the last 
demand of those for whom he holds it, to whom it 
all belongs. 

And now to proceed. We come to speak of the 
more distinctively national blessings of re-occupa- 
tion, for which God claims our thanks. Take your 
map and draw out of the fresh history of the past 
the line that bounded the part of our national inherit- 
ance which was occupied by our national authority 
two years ago; then draw another line, marking the 
limits of our power, military or civil, as it stands 
to-day ; see what lies between them ; what have been 
the blessings of re-occupation thus far in the strug- 
gle. When I hear men talking about the slowness 
of the war, the ineffectiveness of the war, I cannot 
but think that they are men who either have not 
made so simple an experiment, or are not very ready 
to acknowledge its results. Just see what we 
have gained. The great river, which is the lordly 
West, flows open with the light of the Union on it 
from source to sea. The queen city, that sits by its 
mouth to gather in its treasures, is not merely the 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 13 

undisputed subject of the government, but is spread- 
ing the example of her subjectship over all the coun- 
try region that has always looked to her for leading. 
The vast domain west of the Mississippi, with all its 
untold possibilities, if not all ours, is cut off from 
communication with the great centres of rebellion, 
and it is hard to keep up with the telegrams that tell 
us day by day of its progressive occupation by the 
power of the government. Down the broad heart of 
the continent, over those two States which, though 
they do not wear the name, constitute in truth the 
keystone of our broad arch, Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee, the two States that no power meaning to be 
a first-class power on this continent can afford to 
spare, the sweep of Union victory has reclaimed 
for ever the countries that belonged of right to free- 
dom. This very morning, is there one of us that 
has not given thanks to God for the glad thanks- 
giving news that He has sent US'? And in our own 
fair State we have a tale of re-occupation too to tell. 
That fearful invasion, which in the nature of things 
it was inevitable would come upon us sooner or later 
in the course of a rebellion such as this, has been 
swept ignominiously and disastrously back, and the 
silent graves on that hill-front at Gettysburg are 
voiceful with the promise that, come what will, free 



14 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

Northern soil has felt the last footprint of the 
oppressor and invader. 

What shall we say of all this vast re-occupation'? 
What of the joy of such days as that last Fourth of 
July, and that strange Sunday that followed it, which 
not one of us is ever going to forget? Is it just that 
in the tide of ebbing accidents we have reembraced 
part of what we had lost, that the promise is as cer- 
tain as a certainty that we shall re-embrace the whole 
and be just what we were before 1 Not so ! God would 
not have brought us through it all simply for that. 
This re-occupation is to be greater, to make the 
region which it gives us more distinctly ours than it 
was by the first occupation. There is a distinct 
advance. The nation is just coming to its inherit- 
ance. If we do not see it, those who hereafter write 
the history of these times will. Those who come 
after us will look back and see that the work of 
this year was of greater moment in the history 
of the world than that of any revolutionary year; 
they will see that those years inevitably came to 
nothing without the completing processes of these. 
They will say no more, when they want to render 
highest praise — The Lord liveth which brought 
the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt — but, 
The Lord liveth which re-brought them from all the 
lands whither he had driven them, and in the agony 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 15 

of the great rebellion times, completely and for ever 
set them in their land which he had given to their 
fathers. 

But infinitely more important than the mere 
re-occupation of territory, vast as that is, is the 
resumption by this American people in a higher 
sense, the full occupation of the government of their 
fathers, the reentrance into the principles and funda- 
mental truths of the nationality which they inherited, 
but which up to the beginning of this war they had 
not begun worthily to occupy and use. It is the 
great growth of the people in this regard that makes 
one's heart bound fullest of thankfulness to God. 
Just see what some of these fundamental truths are. 
Take first our national independence. More than 
fourscore years ago this nation declared itself free 
and independent — the new ground of a new experi- 
ment in national, social, and individual life. It 
needs no very wise historian to tell how very par- 
tially that bright announcement has been fulfilled. 
We have never half claimed our independence. In 
our timid regard for foreign opinion, in our foolish 
aping of foreign folly, in our blind regard for foreign 
methods, even where the very difi'erence of our posi- 
tion dictated new methods as better methods for the 
work we had to do, we have only very slightly made 
our own the high privilege of independent life. 



16 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

Believe me, it will not be the least of the blessings 
that God sends us ; if by any means, by a development 
of our own powers, by new exigencies leading us into 
the necessity of untried methods, by the individu- 
ality of suffering, (which is true of a nation just as 
of a man,) aye, even by .the terrible disappointment 
which discovers the shallowness of loud-mouthed 
English philanthropy, by the selfishness of the old 
worlds that will not, or the blindness of the old 
worlds that cannot see how grand and holy a task 
a younger world is called to do, if by any means 
He gives us out of the isolation of our national 
struggle a larger entrance into the independent life, 
the separate and characteristic development of gov- 
ernment, art, science, letters, practical religion, and 
social character, which is the wide domain into 
which he led our nation, and whose splendid size it 
has taken us almost a hundred years to find. 

Take again the great republican idea, the idea of 
a people with mutual interests, meeting in self-regu- 
lated action and accomplishing one great result of 
government, which is in the largest sense a common- 
wealth. There has been a great re-occupation there. 
Never before since we were a people have we had 
one great absorbing interest which, overreaching old 
party issues, swept the popular heart away with that 
impulse of larger loyalty which is the essence of the 



OUR MEKCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 17 

republican thought. True, we have our parties still, 
but everybody asks the questions of a republicanism 
that outgoes party, when he wants to find out what 
his neighbour is. We have got broader tests than 
we used to have. We know what it is to be loyal 
to our country now, and that is what we ask: not. Do 
you wear this or that badge'? Are you called by this 
or that name^ But, Are you for the Union'? Are 
you for putting down the rebellion, let it cost what it 
will 1 Whatever your own associations, are you for 
an earnest, hearty, genuine support of that adminis- 
tration by whom, if it be carried on at all, this strug- 
gle of the nation with the traitor must be waged'? 
That is the great republican question that men ask 
each other now. It is in the great Yea of the people 
to that question, and not in the success of any party, 
that we have rejoiced this fall. For as for parties, in 
themselves, they are very harmless, unimportant 
things. We shall always have them. We had them 
long before the war began; we shall have them long- 
after it is over. They only become mischievous when 
they insist on. a permanence beyond their use, and 
that, if they get it, is sure not to last long. Other- 
wise their evils are provided for by their continual 
changes. The same popular opinion which makes 
them in . one form, in some new aggregation of it 
unmakes and remakes them differently. You know 
2 



18 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

how it is in a live and tumultuous ocean. The same 
life-force which makes the waves unmakes them 
every moment, and remakes them into new ones. 
All the time there will be waves, but all the time 
under the waves the power of the sea is active, by its 
same activity making, unmaking, and remaking for 
ever the billows by which it does its work. So in 
a live republic, the life-force of a universal loyalty 
underlying party waves, for ever makes, unmakes, 
and remakes them differently. Their constructive 
and destructive power is the same, this deeper force 
of which they are but the outputtings. So long as 
that deeper force is active, they are good and useful; 
so soon as it dies, they lose their life, grow rigid and 
tyrannical, and kill a nation out, as ours was dying 
before this influx of new loyalty came to save us. 

I am proceeding from the lower to the higher, and 
now I come to the highest of all the re-occupations 
which by God's grace we have been permitted to 
make this year — the re-occupation of the disused 
duties and privileges of justice and liberty and 
human brotherhood. 

You do not expect me, I do not think you want 
me, to stand here to-day without thanking God that 
the institution of African slavery in our beloved 
land is one big year nearer to its inevitable death 
than it was last thanksgiving day. On that day 
certain hopeful words were spoken from this pulpit 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUrATION. 19 

which groped about in the darkness, and timidly 
thought they saw the signs of light. To-day, will 
any man or woman blame us if we stand in the 
anticipation of certainty, and cry above the opened 
grave of slavery, that only waits till its corpse be 
brought to it with the decency its reverend age 
demands, Thank God! thank God! the hateful 
thing is dead ! I am speaking solemnly ; I am 
speaking earnestly; I am speaking as a man whose 
heart is too glad for utterance, in the washing from 
his country's robe, even though it be in the red 
water of her childrens' blood, of such a stain as she 
has worn before the nations through these years of 
her melancholy beauty. What has done if? Not 
the proclamation of last new year's day, (though we 
ought to thank God, as not the least mercy of these 
times, that we have a man to lead us, so honest, so 
true, so teachable at the lips of the Almighty, as to 
write those immortal words that made a race for ever 
free.) Not any public document, not any public 
act has done the work; nothing but the hand of God 
leading back His chosen people into the land of uni- 
versal freedom, into which He led the fathers, and out 
of which the children so wofully went astray. Which 
God is greater, He who led the fathers in, or He who 
leads the children back] At any rate, the Lord grant 
us to be truer to the new charter of emancipation than 
(we own it with shamefacedness and contrition) we 



20 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

have been to the declaration of freedom and human 
equahty which the fathers wrote. 

"With regard to this whole slavery question, I do 
not mean to say much; not that there is not enough 
to say, but I do not see the need of saying it. I 
count the possibilities of the question to be sealed 
up and closed. This restored country is going to be 
a free country, past the power of accident, or malice, 
or prejudice to hinder. With this strange sight, the 
South urging on the North to the wisdom of emanci- 
pation, I may well leave to others to tell the bless- 
ings that the white man is going to feed on in this 
regenerated slaveless land. But speaking from the 
pulpit, putting this question on the highest ground, 
there is one distinction that belongs to us to draw. 
Vs'e hear so many people, even strong anti-slavery men, 
talking about the matter: — "Yes," they say, " Slavery 
is going fast, and we are glad of it. We shall be 
better off without it. The country will be richer. 
The Union will be safer. Our rejoicing is for the 
white man. It is not for the negro that we care." 
They make this last proviso in their creed most 
scrupulously. It seems to me it is a very mean, and 
low, and selfish one to make. It is for the negro 
that we care. It is our fault and not his, that he is 
here. It is our fault, inherited from the fathers, 
that has kept in most utter bondage, and most cruel 
bondage too, (I believe nobody doubts that now,) 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 21 

generation after generation of men who have 
proved themselves the most patient, long-suffering, 
affectionate, and docile race of servants that ever 
lived, and who now, in the little glimmer of a chance 
that is given them, are standing between us and the 
rebels, fighting battles, receiving wounds, dying 
deaths that belong to us more than to them ; fight- 
ing splendidly, working ftiithfully, learning eagerly, 
enduring endlessly, laying hold on a higher life with 
an eagerness that has no parallel in savage history. 
Let the politicians and the economists, dear friends, 
do what they will with all this question. Let us put 
it nowhere but on its highest ground. We rejoice 
in emancipation because it is right. We hate slavery 
because it is wrong. The negro ought to be free. 
He has a right to be free. God is showing us how 
to do it, and by His help we are doing it; casting 
this sin away, and reentering, as He leads us, the 
high temple of human brotherhood, whence by His 
grace we will go no more out. That, and that alone, 
is the true ground to take, the high ground of Duty, 
which binds the conscience of our people to the cause 
of freedom. 

And here I must not pass so quickly on as not to 
find time to thank God with you for another bless- 
ing. Not merely black men but white men have 
been freed this year. Slaveries have been broken 
that never felt an outward lash. Chains have been 



22 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

snapped in sunder that the wearer had never known 
he wore, but which had eaten unseen to within a 
hair's breadth of the vitals of his truth and goodness. 
Do you ask me where ^. Tell me yourself. Is there 
no truth you would not have told your neighbor or 
yourself two years ago, that you say over now every 
time you talk of duty, every time you pray to God'? 
Turn over the dust at your feet and see if there are 
not some bits of broken prejudices yet lying there. 
You never thought slavery was right ! Why did you 
go about year after year among your fellow-men and 
never whisper that you knew it was utterly wrong, 
and that it ought to be got rid of by a consistent 
Christian people! Why, just stand up and breathe 
once in this fresh air of liberty, and see if you are not 
a freer man to breathe a full breath than you ever 
were before! "What shall we render unto the Lord 
for all his benefits to us!" He came and touched 
the great iron chain, and with a groan and a wrench 
it dropped away, and the man who knew his slavery 
knew that he was free. He came with subtler mercy; 
unseen, unfelt, he touched an unseen, unfelt fetter, 
and Oh, the emancipation that has followed to men 
that never knew they had been slaves ! For these 
freed hands we thank our God to-day ; for opened 
mouths, for liberated consciences, for men and women 
who have known the truth and been by it made free. 
Let it go on. We are not all free yet. Old frag- 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 23 

merits of our servitude still cling about us; as, when 
a man comes out of a fever, it leaves him some me- 
mento, blindness or deafness or some kind of vexing 
poison in the blood. Let us get rid of these. If the 
neero is a man, and we have freed him in virtue of 
his manhood, what consistency or honor is it which 
still objects to his riding down the street in the same 
car with us if he is tired, or sitting in the same pew 
with us if he wants to worship God. Brethren, the 
world is not all saved yet. There are a few things 
still that "ought not so to be." 

I should do great injustice to ourselves and to the 
day, if I did not commemorate another great re-occu- 
pation of this past year, whereby not only the people 
but the Church has entered in and repossessed the 
old land that the Lord gave to her fathers. Christi- 
anity, I believe, will never cease to sorrow that the 
Church of Christ was led and not leading in the 
crusade against human slavery in the United States. 
The future historian of the Church will look back 
and wonder at the sight he sees. Year after year 
the Church stood back, while they who fought the 
battle went out from her, and the whole move- 
ment against slavery became not only unchurchly 
but openly infidel, disowning all interest in every 
presentation of that Christianity of whose spirit and 
operation it was nevertheless itself the legitimate 
result. The child Philanthropy not merely deserted 



24 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATIOISr. 

its mother Heligion, but disowned her. But, like 
many another lost child in the world's moral history, 
its inherited birth-marks, the brow and eyes it took 
from her, would keep speaking out its parentage in 
its own despite. If in this year the recreant mother 
has at all come out and claimed her child; if in this 
year the Christian Church has taken among us an 
irrevocable position of hostility to human slavery in 
every shape, let us thank the Lord. I rejoice in 
every symptom tending that way. I rejoice in this 
last struggle, whereby it is fighting its way into its 
dishonored grave, of that old miserable creature, 
the most foolish of all follies, if it had not been the 
most impious of all impieties, which has been digni- 
fied so many years with the name of "The Bible 
Argument for Slavery." I cannot tell you half my 
joy — some of you will understand it by your own — 
when in this most conservative of all conservatisms, 
the Episcopal Church, the reassertion by a Bishop of 
this same old so-called Bible Argument for Slavery, 
stirred the ministry of this diocese to an utterance 
which no man can mistake, of utter eneraity to 
slavery and whatever has anything to do with it." It 
is of very little importance in the world ; it is of very 
little importance in the land ; but it is of very great 
importance in the Episcopal Church, that, for the first 
time in her history, she has set herself flatly, fairly, 
unmistakably against the sin of the nation. As name 



OUR MEECIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 25 

after name was added to that Protest; as the assent 
came in so unanimously from every direction — from 
the mission chapels in the hills, from the cathedral- 
churches in the city, from the seats of our schools 
and our seminary, and above all, thank God, from 
the honored dignity of the Bishop's chair, made dear 
by our love for him, who we pray may long sit in it 
to do true thiuirs like this — it seemed to me as if 
every new assent wiped from the vesture of the 
Church we love some stain of her long compliance, 
and gave promise of the day when she shall stand up 
in her perfect and unsullied excellence, and, wreath- 
ing her venerable beauty with an ever-fresh and 
verdant love for all God's truth, be such a church as 
there is not in the land. 

AMth regard to that Bible Argument for Sla- 
very, this is not the time to go into it at length. 
We must take another sermon for that, if it seems 
necessary. If you want to see it well discussed, 
take the little Pamphlet of Mr. Goldwin Smith, of 
Oxford, called, "Does the Bible sanction American 
Slavery'?" and read it. But, if you will not take the 
time or pains for that, let me just point out to you 
one fallacy and one contradiction which belong to 
every attempt to prove that the Bible recognises 
slavery. The fallacy is in the two meanings of that 
word. Recognition. Men prove elaborately that the 
fact of bondage is recognised in the Bible, Avhich is 



26 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

indisputable; and then they jump you over, and tell 
you that they have proved that the right of bondage 
is recognised in the Bible, which is an entirely 
different thing, and wliich they have not proved at 
all. The contradiction is this: I never found one 
of these " Bible-argument" men who went far enough 
to be consistent — never one who did not think that 
in some future time slavery would be done away, 
and who did not pretend to be glad of the prospect. 
Bishop Hopkins has said so himself. Now ask them 
what they think it is that is thus gradually weaken- 
ing the hold of human slavery, and they say, the 
influence of Christianity/, the operation of the religion 
of that self-same Bible which has consecrated 
slavery by sending back Onesimus and cursing the 
posterity of Ham for ever. How can one keep his 
notions of religion from most desperate bewilder- 
ment, to whom Christianity stands in two such 
strange representations'? Once holding the lifted 
lash over a cowering woman who cannot, or a proud 
man who will not work in bondage, and again open- 
ing the gradual gates by which that man's and 
woman's race is passing out into the glory of a 
freedom to which, by the first plea, it was sacrilege 
to introduce it. 

We are called on, I believe, to accept this new 
position of the Christian Church to-day, not merely 
as definite and noble on this special question, but as 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION". 27 

promising us in the future a more humane, benig- 
nant, Christ-like Churcli in general. She has 
broken one chain ; she will break all the rest, and 
come where she belongs, close to the heart and life 
of every outcast, deep into the bosom of every 
misery and every sin. It will come slowly, but with 
all we see to-day, who refuses to believe that it will 
come at lasf? 

" Oh, heart of mine, keep patience ! Looking forth 
As from the Mount of Vision I behold 
I'ure, just, and free, the Church of Christ on earth — 
The martyr's dream, the golden age foretold! 

And, found at last, the mystic Graal I see, 

Brimmed with His blessing, pass from lip to lip, 
In sacred pledge of human fellowship; 
And over all the songs of angels hear, — 
Songs of the love that casteth out all fear, — 
Songs of the Gospel of Humanity! 

Lo ! in the midst, with the same look he wore, 
Healing and blessing on G-enuesaret's shore, 
Folding together, with the all-tender might 

Of His great love, the dark hands and the white, 
Stands the Consoler, soothing every pain, 

3Iaking all burdens light, and breaking every chain!" 

And now there are other Mercies of lie-occupation 
which no one who preaches a Thanksgiving Sermon 
to-day must forget. I turn away from national 
mercies, and come home to private lives. Let us 
sit down together in our own souls, and see if there 
are not rooms of grace there which we had not been 



28 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

in for long years, whose rusty doors God has forced 
to open and let us in this year. Are there none 
here who have gone into a new chamber, wherein 
they found a strangeness that bewildered them. 
Its floors were bare and rough, and hurt the feet ; 
its walls were jagged and untapestried; no regal 
comfort in its furniture; but yet, bare and bleak as 
it was, you loved to live in it, because of the strange 
light that came in at its one eastern window, and 
touched the stern walls with a softness and a color 
such as we dream must have been in the poor 
chamber where the disciples ate of the passover with 
the Lord. Have none of you, this year, lived in the 
long-forgotten room of Charity, with its bare walls 
and hard floor of self-sacrifice, and its eastward 
window that looked to the everlasting Sacrifice for alii 
Now and then, in the high impulses of childhood, 
you crept into it, and found it glorious. Thank 
God, O men and women, if the Master has led you 
in again, and let you live there in these holy days! 

And have we not all learned to re-occupy another 
grace which has been unfamiliar — the grace of 
Hope, of trust in highest principles amid discourage- 
ment '? We used to know it somewhat years ago. 
There is a magnificent trust in principles which a 
child has, which is after all the ideal of the highest 
manhood. And if we have re-entered it at all; 
if we are stronger than we used to be, to know that 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 29 

everything will come out right just because it oufjlit 
to; if the discipline of waiting for God has so drilled 
our nature into unity with His, that it believes as His 
does in the inevitableness of principles and truths, 
and hopes, as His does, by the elastic inspiration of 
that belief, then we have much to be thankful for in 
so benignant a re-occupation of one of the holiest 
chambers of our life. I look beyond this quiet life 
of ours, and others who have been more blessed, 
because more tried, have gone far deeper into this 
holy room of hope than we have. I think of men, 
our brethren, who have learned hope as they stood 
waiting in the long dark line of battle; who have 
clung to truth and to the character of God, to the 
certainty of the victorious right, when they have had 
nothing else to cling to ; who have been led, as we 
must all be led, but speedier by the impulse of the 
fiery life they lived, out of despair in self into the 
assurance of the Lord. I think of them, and if I 
could speak to them, I would say, with the reverence 
I feel for every one of them, Thank God, my 
brothers, for your hope. 

There is a holier re-occupation still, of which we 
may not speak, but which they know who have been 
led into it by God. Wherever any heart, long used 
to happiness, has had to turn aside some day from 
the war-news it was so carelessly reading, startled by 
something that it saw, and go apart and enter into 



30 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION". 

the clouded room of Patience, and sit there thence- 
forth, waiting till the last Great Revealer should 
reveal the mystery of the mercy that took some 
young fresh manhood out of its new usefulness, into 
what higher usefulness of the other life we know not; 
wherever any heart, so sitting in the grace of patience, 
has found itself in sudden sympathy with the patient 
Christ, and through Him passed into the anticipation 
of eternal union with the soul that Christ had taken, 
there is the purest and truest thankfulness God hears 
to-day. 

Our Mercies of Re-occupation — I have tried to 
show you what the new sort of mercy is for which 
we are to render thanks to-day. We are not to go 
back to thank God for revolutionary times. Here 
are mercies greater than our fathers'; let us thank 
Him for them. We are completing the preparation 
for our national life. We are entering on the full 
enjoyment of the heritage which our fathers and we 
thus far have but half-used. These days will be the 
memorable days in American history. "The days 
come that it shall no more be said. The Lord liveth 
which brought up the children of Israel out of the 
land of Egypt, but. The Lord liveth which brought 
up the children of Israel from the lands whither He 
had driven them; and I will bring them again into 
their land which I gave unto their fathers." 

I stand and look, and lo ! the Lord is leading this 



OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 31 

people in the great march of re-occiipation. Back 
over the false policies, through the deceitful expe- 
diencies, from the wilderness of self-indulgence 
through which they had been scattered, they gather 
host on host to go up to the mountain of Jehovah 
which He has given them to dwell in, back to the 
simple honesty, the earnest patriotism, and a far 
better realization of the thought of human liberty, 
which was the land the Lord God gave their flithers. 

Shall we have strength to walk that road 1 Shall 
we have courage to keep step with God as He leads 
us into all that we might be ? It is no easy thing 
for a man to be sure of. 

For, first, he who walks the way that God has 
laid out for this people in these days, must be 
utterly and wholly loyal; loyal to his country 
because loyal to his God; out of sympathy with 
treason, in every shape, in every place, because trea- 
son is out of sympathy with truth, because it hinders 
the re-occupation by his country of its high destiny 
of union and peace, and the blessings of pure repub- 
lican government. 

And he must be not only loyal, but very free- 
hearted, teachable, ready to let God lead him into 
all new, even into all startling truth; ready to see a 
new race rise into the life of freedom, and accept it 
and help it to whatever best position its capacities 
may command. 



C^HL 



32 OUR MERCIES OF RE-OCCUPATION. 

And to be both of these, he must be full of the 
spirit of self-sacrifice and charity. He must count 
not himself dear, no labor too great, no expense too 
heavy, until the work be done, the Land have entered 
on the re-occupation of its perfect life. 

For these are days that will not die. They are 
making the thanksgiving days of the years to come. 
As we go up, following the Lord, into our heritage, 
it is our privilege, as it was of the men who followed 
Joshua over Jordan, to stoop in the very bed of the 
stream and pick up stones of thankfulness which, 
brought safely over, shall be for all time piled np in 
our Gilgal, for the memorial of the days when Israel 
came through the deep waters. 

"And Joshua spake unto the children of Israel, 
saying, AVhen your children shall ask their fathers 
in time to come, saying, What mean these stones'? 
Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel 
came over this Jordan on dry land. For the 
Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from 
before you, until ye were passed over : That all the 
people of the earth might know the hand of the 
Lord, that it is mighty — that ye might fear the 
Lord your God for ever." 



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